Theft is Abdulrazak Gurnah’s first novel since being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021. At the time, the Swedish Academy lauded the Tanzanian-British author’s “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism”.
His new book is set largely in Zanzibar, the island of his birth, and opens soon after “the upheavals and confusions of the struggle to rid themselves of the British”. But Theft is more interested in family dynamics, personal duty and kindness than with ethnic and cultural tensions or colonisation.
We first meet Raya as a young woman, liable to succumb to the charms of Rafik, a “hooligan soldier” who alternates between wearing Fidel Castro’s cap and Che Guevara’s black beret. Raya’s father hastily arranges for her to marry Bakari Abbas, a divorcé in his 40s, to save her honour. Abbas, however, proves abusive, and Raya flees back to her parents’ house when her son, Karim, is 3 years old. This is relayed almost breathlessly in the first five pages, a torrent of telling that continues for much of the novel.
Soon, Raya is remarried to Haji, son of the wealthy and embittered Othman, and living with both in Dar es Salaam. Karim, now a teen, stays in Zanzibar, moving in with his half-brother, Ali, and Ali’s wife Jalila. The young couple’s sacrifices mean Karim can excel at school and university, eventually becoming a project manager who is shoulder-tapped by a government minister to work on an EU-funded green development programme.
As Karim grows from boy to man, we are also introduced to Badar, a country boy brought to Raya and Haji’s house to cook and clean for them, and Fauzia, a young woman whose brush with falling sickness as a child has made her mother into a worrywart and will taint her own foray into motherhood.
In less assured hands, the shifts in focus and minimal dialogue might lead to a scattering of the reader’s attention and affections. But Gurnah manages to build up each new focal character as a potential hero in a complex and imperfect world. We are asked to consider the degrees of their goodness and what might lead to their downfall.
Such ruin beckons when Badar is accused of stealing from Raya and Haji’s household. But Karim steps in, paying his half-brother’s kindness forward, and invites Badar to live with him and Fauzia in Zanzibar. He even helps Badar into a role shadowing the assistant manager of the Tamarind, “an exclusive upmarket boutique hotel in the heart of the old town”, according to its advertising brochures. From the precipice of shame and poverty, Badar finds himself with friends and a future.
Not even the beautiful, clarinet-playing hotel guest, Geraldine “Jerry” Bruno, from Gemstone St, London NW3, can lead Badar astray. She is in Zanzibar as a volunteer, helping digitise government records (another EU-funded project). When Badar cannot abandon his post at the Tamarind, she directs her attentions to Karim.
In a certain kind of novel, Jerry Bruno would be the embodiment of the despoiling forces of European money, through tourism and aid, her cavalier behaviour its own echo of the German and British colonial endeavours in East Africa. But Jerry is also a 21-year-old woman stimulated by, and a little fearful of, Zanzibar.
Karim, too, has been built up over the course of the novel to be the kind of character that cannot be reduced to national or ethnic stereotypes. His actions do not stand in for the missteps of post-colonial governments, but they do speak to how smarts and dedication can lead to vanity and selfishness. This is less post-colonial soapbox than Greek tragedy.
Although the novel proceeds at a rapid pace, there are occasional eddies. The most pronounced are whenever a new building is introduced. The Tamarind Hotel is given a full backstory, beginning its life as the residence of the French Consul in the days of the sultanate. When it is time for Badar to leave Karim and Fauzia’s cramped apartment, he takes a room in a building belonging to man named Hakim, who “by diligence and trustworthiness” lifted himself from a humble position. We learn about Hakim’s business dealings in Abu Dhabi and how he has arranged the building into its constituent tenancies.
Hakim does not reappear in the novel, but he is more important to the building than a street address or ratings valuation. Gurnah doesn’t locate these buildings so much as give them a genealogy. Characters and places become enmeshed in a web of associations, where the greatest virtue is often endurance.
Towards the end of the novel, Badar looks up Gemstone St, NW3, on GoogleMaps. He searches for people and associations. Did the man in the white shirt on the Street View image know Jerry Bruno? “Was he Jerry’s brother, perhaps, or even her husband or boyfriend?”
Without these associations, the internet has little to offer Badar. But for the attentive reader, Theft offers plenty.
Theft, by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Bloomsbury, $37), is out now.
